


padparadscha

by Aezlo



Category: Leverage
Genre: Background Relationships, F/M, Hand Jobs, Headaches & Migraines, Late Night Conversations, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:41:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29362680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aezlo/pseuds/Aezlo
Summary: Parker goes to Eliot for help with a migraine in the middle of the night.Set sometime in season 2.
Relationships: Parker/Eliot Spencer (Leverage)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	padparadscha

She goes to Eliot because she knows that he’ll have something to deal with pain. Yes, Eliot’s whole job being the hitter means being _hit_ and that’s a different kind of pain than this, more ice and tidy handsewn stitches than an insistent, constant ache that throbs through her jaw and face and head and shoulders and won’t stop, won’t stop, _won’t stop_.

But.

But she also knows that he has just regular, everyday pain, maybe not entirely like this, but she’s seen him flex his fingers and ice his oft-bloodied knuckles even when they’re whole, watched him pull something out from under his jacket, a plastic pack that he’ll toss in the microwave like a packet of popcorn while they wait for everyone to get sorted for the briefing before hissing slightly as he tucks it back against his left shoulder.

She hasn’t had a migraine this bad since… well, maybe the last time had been a concussion, actually, now that she thinks about it. She hadn’t really known the gradations between concussions and headaches before working so closely with a hitter, to be fair. It’s been a few years, either way, and she’d usually just tuck herself into some place dark and grind her teeth until the pain finally finished drilling away at her brain. But this time, the pain is so loud that rocking in place next to one of her cabinets isn’t helping, and she’s rapped her knuckles bloody against the cement floor when she realizes: _oh, Eliot might have something that would help_.

It’s a dry night tonight for which she’s grateful; one of the streetlights outside of Eliot’s grungy little flat makes a constant, high-pitched _fzzt_ noise if it’s even the slightest bit damp or foggy, and that’s normally like nails on a chalkboard, never mind when she’s like this. She’s clumsy, flops the landing as she makes it onto the roof of his complex, and bangs an elbow as she clatters to keep Nate’s hangover sunglasses over her eyes so that the stupid streetlight doesn’t steal any more of her vision. She’s practically walking around with her eyes closed even with the glasses on anyway.

She’d followed Eliot back to his safehouses sort of on accident in the beginning, and she doesn’t know how he’ll feel about her following him this time. Usually they meet in more open, unsecured locations like Nate’s apartment, or Hardison’s apartment, or outside of a gym, or the hotel they’re all staying at while they’re on a job. He might be okay with it? Eliot and she are sometimes on the same wavelength, but sometimes not, and it’s hard to say where the lines are drawn until she trips over them.

She clambers down the side of the roof, crawling down to a fire escape that leads her to Eliot’s window on the third floor. She shimmies the window open, blowing her slightly gritty ponytail out of her face and giving Eliot a too-toothy smile as she sees him register her presence sharply: tensing, releasing, and then frowning deeply at her.

“Parker?” he grunts, setting down the knife he’s sharpening or polishing with a soft clink. He’s acquired a sofa since the last time she’d spied on him, which makes her glad. The space still feels… sad, in a way, like someone holding their breath for too long and going gray in the face. She combs her fingers through her ponytail to clean off the grit and shoves Nate’s glasses firmly back up her nose from where they’re slipping down again, too large for her face.

“What’s wrong?” Eliot asks, grunting as he pushes himself up from the floor and rubbing along his hamstring from having sat in one position for too long.

She bounces towards him and he watches her warily, his eyes cataloguing her climbing clothes, the stolen glasses, and her bounciness which is… more akin to a sleepy puppy than her usual manic energy.

“Migraine,” she offers, considering the set of shiny knives left on Eliot’s coffee table with a vague curiosity. Eliot frowns, and she watches as he walks through her logic for coming here until he quirks a brow at her.

“You taken anythin’ for it yet?” he asks, sliding the knives into their little slots and hefting the bag up onto his kitchen countertop. She shakes her head, and grimaces as the staying put, not having the wind on her face or the purpose of coming here to tug her along starts to settle on her and the migraine begins really throbbing again. Eliot grunts his assent at her, and shuffles off towards his ensuite bathroom, flicking lights off as he goes until the only light on in the apartment is just the one on under the range in the kitchen.

She hears the rattle of pills in a bottle, the sound of a faucet turning on and then off again, and realizes belatedly that she’s sat down on the edge of Eliot’s bed, and taken off Nate’s glasses. She’s picking at some of the plastic along the edge of one of the arms of the glasses when a small cup full of water is thrust into her face along with one of Eliot’s fists held out to drop a pill or two in her hand.

“It’ll make ya nauseous, maybe, but it should knock it out. When didja last eat?” he asks, and she shakes her head very slightly as she knocks back the pill and the water that he’s just given her. “I’m making you toast,” he tells her, taking the cup back and gently putting Nate’s glasses on his bedside stand next to the lamp that’s still ticking faintly from being on earlier.

“C’mon, no crumbs in bed,” he squeezes her shoulder to persuade her to follow him.

She perches on one of the arms of the couch a little clumsily, but he makes no comment as he busies himself sawing off a slice of bread. It might be homemade, but she can’t really tell? She’s watched Eliot make entire feasts by himself after some of their jobs, with split lips and bruised ribs, and she doesn’t really get it? But it’s fun to watch, or, at least it had been at some of the other places where the streetlight didn’t _fzzt_ incessantly in the background.

She tries to chew through the buttered toast he’s given her, but it’s like trying to eat mushed up cardboard. She can feel the texture of it too keenly against her overly sensitive teeth, and the light on the range isn’t making any noise, but it’s so bright it seems like it’s screaming.

She abandons the toast to go grab Nate’s glasses back up and put them on her face, and Eliot hums thoughtfully behind her. He rustles through his cupboards for a bit, takes back her abandoned toast and seems to doctor it up maybe. The pain is making it difficult to track Eliot and what he’s doing, other than knowing that he’s in the kitchen. A few minutes later, a ceramic plate smelling of caramelized sugar and cinnamon is held in front of her, the cinnamon toast still warm from the toaster oven.

The sugar wins out over the cardboardiness, and she’s able to messily devour the toast while Eliot chuckles faintly in the background. She waits, tense, for the waves of pain assaulting her head to begin lessening, but if they do, it’s happening so gradually that she’s having difficulty noticing.

Eliot pulls out his knife set again and makes sure things are properly situated before tucking them away in some compartment that she’s not paying a terrible amount of attention to, considering. She rocks back and forth a little on the arm of the couch, the beat in her head and body too much to keep inside.

“Hmmph,” Eliot furrows his brow, but doesn’t offer anything more as he takes back the slightly crumby plate from her hand. Her grip on it has been wilting since she finished it, so the crumbs are already mostly spilled on his floor and couch.

“You get these often?” he busies himself with the two dirty glasses next to his sink, his back turned to her and she sighs a little in relief as the waves of pain begin to ease enough that she can relax her pose on the couch, letting herself puddle onto the cushions.

“No,” she mumbles, lying back and staring at Eliot’s cottage cheese ceiling. “Will this make me sleep?” she asks, feeling achy and tired. It’s likely some time after midnight, so she might just be tired from being up for over twenty hours, or perhaps just from the weight of carrying all that pain squarely on her shoulders.

Eliot scoffs quietly, “No. Maybe a little drowsy.” The way he says _drowsy_ makes her think of him doing something swooshy with his hand, like whenever he’s realized the thing that he’s just smacked someone with is not, technically, a weapon and he’s tickled by that.

“’kay,” she tells the ceiling and she feels Eliot’s gaze turn back to her as he leans over his countertop, idly rubbing his wrist that she’s pretty sure he broke on a recent heist. Maybe he’d just sprained it, though, since he had held up her weight when she’d needed a boost in the elevator without any problems.

“D’ya need anythin’ else?” he drawls softly, and she startles, realizing that maybe her feeling safe and secure here in his space is not warranted, that maybe she’s overstayed her welcome, and Eliot expects her to take his pills and leave. But when she cranes her stiff neck to stare at him, Eliot looks… well, as easy and relaxed as he is in anyone else’s presence. He doesn’t seem to be shooing her out, at least not yet. She knows how Eliot gets when he wants you gone from a space, when he’s efficiently removing a perp versus when he’s _gently suggesting_ with a firm grip to the elbow and a Not-Eliot smile hung poorly on his face.

She licks her lips, feeling skittish and bold. Eliot’s backlit but she catches the curve of the smirk lodged in his cheek as she quietly suggests, “Distract me?”

* * *

The first time with Eliot, there’d been something with… gold? Or sapphires maybe. Or… well, maybe no jewels or rare metals at all. She knows that her ideas about sex and people and good things and—and her ideas about money and jewels all get kind of crossed. She’d been _so, so_ certain that Rebecca Modart at age sixteen, had had a gem that simply _must_ rival the Hope Diamond in size hiding in her bedroom somewhere. But when she’d gone back to the little sleepy town of Council Bluffs to dig it up all that she’d found was a room painted in lilac with sun stains on the walls where the boyband posters had been peeled off.

After a con had gone well, she’d gotten that bubbly happy feeling where she’d wanted to touch someone, and she wasn’t in the habit of tamping down the good feelings when they deigned to come around. She might’ve been worried, a little, because Eliot was a guy, and she usually slept with women, but… well, Eliot had caught her when she’d jumped from the Retzing’s second floor and that _meant_ something… though, she was pretty sure neither of them knew what.

It had been nice, really; bubbly and fizzy the entire way, and he listened when she said no fingers, and then again when she said nothing inside the next time. He wrestled gamely with her, fought to pin her down with his mouth and didn’t let go until she was wheezing and gasping, which was incredibly _hot_ for some reason. Then, he disappeared in the bathroom for a few minutes and came back a bit more relaxed and refreshed and settled himself down on the bed next to her. He didn’t even insist on touching her afterwards, or talking about anything, though they still did that sometimes.

It wasn’t until the third time that she remembered, _duh_ , Eliot was going off to the bathroom to take care of himself, and he’d probably taken her requests to mean that she had a problem with penises which just wasn’t true. Penetration was just a sometimes thing for her, so the obvious route for him was off the table. She really had to be in the mood for it, and once she’s gotten off, she sort of forgets about other stuff, and people are usually a lot pushier about their own orgasms than Eliot is. She doesn't mind it, though; she likes different, and she likes puzzles.

The next time, she made a point to crowd him up against the wall with her body, using his uncertainty to pin his arms lazily and suck at his neck. She’d thought it might be the hair, then, that brought her in, that made her pick him over the pretty barista with a nose ring who always remembered to give her a big handful of sugar packets along with her order. Eliot had really nice hair that day, mussed and curly post-work out and she’d been surprised at how sharp the _zing_ was at seeing him utterly flabbergasted and flushed as she crowded him up against the wall. Instead of letting him trail her back to the bed to eat her out, she’d nimbly shucked him of his pants and stroked him off, and yeah, she’s less experienced with his anatomy but it’s a lot like tipping her ear against a safe and listening to the tumblers click into place, feeling along until the right combination gets her the outcome that she wants. The growl and surprised grunt in the shape of her name as he came had been very… _padparadscha_.

Tonight, Eliot is treating her like she’s made of very delicious, very delicate porcelain. The room’s painted in darkness except for a splash of yellow from the not- _fzzting_ streetlight limning out the couch and the bumps and humps of Eliot’s shoulders and backside, still dimly backlit by the light left on in the kitchen. He’s wearing a lot of layers, like he always is (two tanks, one sloppily unbuttoned pajama top, one pair of pajama bottoms, one pair of boxer shorts, one pair of ratty socks), and she makes a note to see if she can get the pajama top off of him and get that hair tie out sometime soon, when she can stop feeling her fillings existing in her head and get a solid breath of air in her lungs that doesn’t immediately whoosh out of her in a gasp or moan.

He mouths down her labia, hot and slow, and works his way sloppily back up, and she’s expecting him to repeat the motion, but instead he limpets his mouth over her clit and she shudders and howls, fingers digging through his hair and the deep pleased hum buzzing over her tells her that _he_ likes that very much but for her, that’s just this side of _too much._ She accidentally kicks him in the ear and he grunts and glowers up at her grumpily and while the noisy vibrations are nice, she uses the grip she has on his hair to work on pulling his head up to hers.

He tries to say something, but she doesn’t really hear it in between the brilliance of pleasure singing in her veins and the dull throb of pain in her head. Something like, “good?” or “okay?” but she drags his mouth to hers and ends up forcing him to drop a lot of his weight onto her as she yanks one of his arms out from under him and pushes it between her legs.

He grumbles, elbowing his way back above her so that he’s not crushing her, and she skitters her pickpocket hands over his shoulders to remove the pajama shirt while he lets his fingers find their place rubbing along her outer labia firmly. The motion makes her curl up into him, breaking the kiss and giving her a bare glint of his smug smile before her eyes cinch closed.

She’s making soft mewling noises now and Eliot looks unbearably soft for a moment as he croons in a low-register, “That good for ya, darlin’?” It takes a second for the words to process, his drawl is thick, but once she parses, she nods eagerly, and mumbles a “please” before kissing the sweat beckoning on his collarbone.

He chuckles softly, first just using his thumb to circle the hood of her clit and her hips rock up a little at him as she sucks and nips at his jaw. The little sharp pains of his stubble are interesting and just make her nip harder in retribution. He huffs a little gruffly, like he might not like how rough she’s being, but his jaw ends up tilted up to expose his throat to her and she digs her hand into his hair to root herself as she sucks marks down his neck.

With her other hand, she shuffles off his pajama pants, and Eliot’s now working his index and middle finger in tighter, deeper pressure circles around and around and over her clit maddeningly. She’s going to feel a bit bruised tomorrow probably, but it feels fantastic now, so she doesn’t care as long as he doesn’t stop anytime soon.

She gropes for the bulge she knows is going to be there, with no real pretense or set up, just a blind sharp grab and jerk, and y’know, maybe? Maybe Eliot should be excused of the yelp and the fact that his fingers slip and end up tugging into her cunt shallowly, leaving a small tear of pain in their wake.

He swears lowly under his breath, pulling his hand back carefully and rearing his head back to give her a _look_. They stare at each other for a long moment, sharing hot puffing breaths and blinking at one another for a few beats.

“Y’alright?” he asks, only somewhat sourly, as she’s now gently patting his cock through his boxers like someone might awkwardly pat a crying person’s shoulder. She nods hesitantly, eyes finally darting away from his and tipping down his front as she quietly reminds him, “Nothing inside, please.”

“I—” he looks ready to fire up on one of his patented Hardison-aimed rants, but he closes his eyes and sighs deeply. “Here,” he begins making to crawl back down her body to use his mouth but he lets out an odd, hissing noise as she grips his lower abdomen, thankfully, and not his cock, in her tight grip.

“Here,” she frowns at him, and tightens her grip in his hair, pulling him back up. “Here,” she reiterates, nodding her head at where he’s currently perched over her as Eliot continues to look down at her with pursed brows. They share a long look of Eliot assessing her and Parker staring right back up at him, until Eliot gives in, tentatively rubbing down her abdomen and kissing her softly, too carefully, hardly even opening his mouth to her.

She rolls her hips insistently up at his hand and turns the kiss biting and hard, making him suck in a sharp breath, a low hungry noise rumbling through him. If he’d had his hands on her then, that might very well have made her come from the pulse of arousal it sends through her. She must make a noise, it sounds like someone is whining in a high register nearby and Eliot is now kissing down her neck and rubbing his thumb in sharp, insistent circles around her clit. She needs _more_ , and she’s desperate, so even with Eliot’s mouth nibbling along her breast, she hooks her legs around his hips without really thinking, trapping his hand between them. She rocks her hips against him as she uses her arms to crawl up his shoulders and Eliot freezes, but only for a brief second, the little choked off, mewling noises that she’s making are clear enough that she’s okay with this, so with some grumbling readjustment of his weight now that she’s hanging off of him and grinding up against him as he braces himself above his own damn bed, he pants softly into her shoulder as he focuses on coordinating the jerks of his fingers along with her rocking until she makes a sharp keening noise, her body going taut and shaking around him.

“Tha’s it,” his voice is low and thick, and he’s looking down at her with something burning and intense in his eyes as he gentles her down onto the bed, strands of his hair flicking into his face from his thoroughly mussed ponytail. He mutters some other soft, grumbly encouragements that get lost in the easy molasses slide of her body onto his bed, his fingers gently winding her down the slope of the aftershocks.

“Mmm,” she smiles up at him for a moment, her eyes tracing the muss of his hair and thinking of ducats glinting in the summer sun while he watches her, the blazing heat in his eyes banking to a softer warmth as she settles firmly into the afterglow. She brings both of her hands up and rakes them through his hair, effectively twanging the rubber band holding it somewhere around the room and completely flustering him.

“Parker,” Eliot grumbles, boosting himself up on his other elbow, the arm with the bad wrist and the one he’d been working her over with, and it tremors visibly as he forcefully pushes his hair out of his face with his cleaner hand.

She cackles and knocks his shaking arm out from under him with her elbow and shoves him onto his side next to her. He grumbles and tries to resettle, figure out what she’s doing, while she squirms close enough to kiss him all sloppy and nippy, enjoying the heat radiating from his skin. She steals her hand into his boxers and his hot breath stutters into her face as she begins forcefully tugging at him. He's tacky-slick from his own precum, but it's not enough for how hard and fast she always goes and he grunts, already moving to push away from her so that she takes her other hand and shoves it into their kiss. Eliot’s eyes darken, and he loses track of the kiss and pulls back to watch her suck and slick her own fingers while she idly twiddles her thumb over the slit of his cock and around the ridge of foreskin that’s mostly pulled back by this point. Once she’s satisfied with the spit-lubrication, she brings both hands down to pull at his cock in long, hard strokes that make him gulp and pull his hips away as his breathing goes harsh and hungry.

He's breathing too hard to keep kissing so she nips down to his shoulder, and bites purposefully on his exposed clavicle. It always makes him go still; she’d bitten a dark bruise-mark into his shoulder the first or second time that they’d gotten together and his breath had gone choppy and short, his body stiff and shivery as she’d bitten her peak into his skin. She’d guessed that meant that he likes it, and well, she tends to bite a lot anyway, so it’s not hard to work nipping and biting into things.

Eliot’s clearly racing towards his own orgasm, and he tries to brace himself against the bed but instead slips and ends up holding himself up on his side for her by bracing against her very actively jerking shoulder.

"P-parker," he grunts, his voice low and growly, causing another low bloom of arousal in her. His body jerks a little abortively as he struggles not to pull her closer and bury his head in her chest, instead digging his head into his own arm on the bed as he pants, hair flailing and puffing over his face in sweaty strands as he comes over her hands and streaks up his tank.

She loosens her grip only a little, still pulling at him and earning soft chuffing, laughing noises from Eliot's bitten lips as he closes his eyes and purses his brows, fighting and grit-grinning his way through the overstimulation. He manages to grunt her name out again, his sharp blue eyes catching hers as he pants, and she relents, wiping her hands all up and down his thoroughly soiled black tank, taking advantage and groping here and there just for fun.

He chuckles a little wistfully, looking down at it for a moment, like he’s considering just lying there with the mess he’s made but he pushes himself up to sitting and yanks it off. The second top underneath it is thin with what looks like a muddy brown stain smudged along and down the left shoulder; it nearly jerks off along with the first top, exposing his solid flank. She likes the look of his flanks, the look of his muscles and body glimpsed through his tight henleys and flannels. He’s built, but not scarily so; his muscles don’t look like they’re trying to escape from his skin or like they’re pills in a blister pack. He just looks like… Eliot.

She watches drowsily as he bunches up the shirt and wipes himself down, and then gently nudges her back and swabs up her inner thighs a bit with a clean section of the shirt. She hadn't really noticed it, but she'd been a little uncomfortably damp there and she mumbles some appreciation at him. He goes to step off the bed, but he overbalances, wobbly with his own orgasm or just tripping over some stray clothing article strewn on the floor, and nearly falls. He grunts and catches himself on his bedside table, causing a clattering ruckus as Nate’s glasses get caught on his fingers and twang across the room and his bedside lamp clunks to the floor.

He huffs grumpily and glances back at her with a repressive look, daring her to say something, and that just makes her cackle again. He lopes into his bathroom and she hears his faucet, and loses a few minutes with her eyes closed, curled on her side and just feeling her body exist, tingles and bruises and throbbing in her head and aching in her neck. It’s tolerable enough now with the other sensations that Eliot’s pulsed through her systems, and she’s starting to drift to sleep when Eliot’s knee dips the bed in front of her and she feels him tapping her on the shoulder.

“Water?” he asks, offering the cup again and she blinks at it for a moment, but takes it and downs it greedily, swabbing at her mouth sloppily as it’s difficult drinking water while stubbornly laying down. When she hands it back, he sets it down on the bedside table and bends to put his lamp back to rights before dropping onto the bed next to her.

His breathing is calm and even, and he appears to be staring blankly up at his ceiling. She knows he has problems sleeping, and though she usually catnaps after sex, Eliot seems to just settle but not nap. She hums as she turns her head to see if there’s something on his ceiling, thinking of some movie she’d seen in snippets where someone had a poster plastered above their bed. She’d thought it kind of creepy because they’d hung a poster of some random boy and not like, a Vermeer, but Eliot’s ceiling is just blank and white.

She crawls towards him a little, just to feel his warmth again, and stares blankly at the ceiling while her fingers doodle nonsense into Eliot’s bedcovers. His eyes are closed by the time that she speaks again, but he’s definitely not asleep.

“Thanks,” she says softly, and closes her eyes when she sees Eliot’s eyes blink open and flick to her. Her head still aches, and she doesn’t really want to even _think_ about deciphering anyone right now.

Eliot chuffs a little at her, and she pictures his eyes crinkling a bit, a very small uptick in his lips which should be harder to read than it is. When she chances a squint, his face is a fair approximation of her estimate, though he’s starting to slow-blink at his ceiling again.

“Anytime,” he offers softly, acknowledging that she’s opened her eyes to the conversation without forcing her to engage by looking over at her.

She curls a little closer, and Eliot does one of those usually-unnoticeable tenses but in bed, with no-one else around, she can’t help but notice. She has her hand near his left shoulder, the bad one, she thinks, and somehow, that has her thinking of her hand on Hardison’s shoulder as she bumps him into the emergency exit, about how he kisses her so intently, and she knows it’s the wrong thing to say, people don’t like being reminded of other people while they’re in bed, but that’s just how her mind works.

“Hardison doesn’t—” she pauses at another sharp tense from Eliot, not anger or disgust like she would expect, but something else that she can’t read. “Hardison doesn’t want this,” she frowns at Eliot’s throat, the bob of his adam’s apple as he swallows and the bend and bow of his chest as he breathes, slow and calm, in and out.

Eliot releases a long, slow exhale, closing his eyes. “No,” he agrees, and she’s gratified that she’s read the situation right. Eliot’s almost as good as Sophie at reading people and grifting people, and Sophie’s gone right now, so she can’t always ask her things, and sometimes it’s just so much work to even explain or _get_ to her questions with Sophie that it’s exhausting. Eliot jerks slightly, like he’s just realized that he’s forgotten something and twitches his hand up as if to forestall her, “Well. He may—”

“He wants more,” Parker says, her focus pinpointing down to his wrist which he shifts a little like he’s shrugging and nodding, but just with his hand.

Eliot grumbles an agreement, and Parker hums back at him, her brain whirring away on the problem. Hardison keeps talking about wanting to make out, and make out for “real” and Parker likes making out with him, whether it’s a distraction or not, but… Hardison wants to make out the same way that Sandra had wanted to take her out to dinner and dancing and offered to split a U-Haul for Parker to move her stuff into her place and had made big pouty sad faces when she saw that Parker lived in a warehouse and—and—

Hardison wants more, more than just… this, just sharing a moment in bed, and… and…

Her chest aches for a moment, a twinge which she can’t really translate meaning into. She squints at a spot above Eliot’s dresser on the far wall, pain starting to sharpen in her scalp and forehead again as her mind bucks at the idea of what she’s feeling. Or maybe it’s just another wave of the migraine as her teeth throb along with her heartbeat, and she realizes that she’s holding her neck too tense and that’s starting to throb, too.

She crawls a little closer to Eliot’s shoulder, wiggling and poking near and around Eliot’s arm that’s lying along his side while she chews her lip. After a moment she hunches a little, tucking her head down and scuttling closer to him. She closes her eyes, and nuzzles into Eliot’s shoulder as she steals his arm to cuddle against. She doesn’t have Bunny to cuddle with here, and whenever she’s sleeping somewhere unusual without her, she’ll usually wake up with a blanket or jacket bunched up awkwardly under her arm in a makeshift stuffy. She pinches her eyes shut; it’s too hard to deal with her vision right now, focusing on everything else that’s going in her head, and Eliot chuffs a little at her again but doesn’t shift or try to pull her closer or even push her away.

She keeps shifting and settling a little more, like a dog circling before thumping down to rest. Eliot rolls his neck and pats above him to pull his pillow down and tuck it underneath his head and the shoulder that she’s claimed, settling himself in for however long her nap is. He might doze, or he might just pretend to for her sake so that when she gets up and disappears in the grey hours they don’t have to talk. Sometimes she stays for breakfast, but she doesn’t think that she will this time.

She feels mixed up and muddled, and her head still hurts a little, but Eliot’s warmth against her allows her to slip into something like sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a type of sapphire, by the way, yellow-orange-ish in hue.
> 
> The Parker/Eliot relationship is the one I have the most conflicting feelings about but this story sort of poured out super easily, which well, I'm not gonna fight that. They're all complex people with complex relationships with touch and intimacy (and each other), and hopefully I did some justice trying to capture a sliver of that.
> 
> This may be the beginning of a series, exploring the OT3's build up over the seasons. 
> 
> Comments and kudos are appreciated, and you can bother me on [tumblr](http://aezlo.tumblr.com/) if you so desire.


End file.
